?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Untitled (Girl Skipping Rope).
Oil on canvas, circa 1959-1960. 635x760 mm; 25x30 inches, lower right. Signed in oil, lower right. Small repaired puncture, lower right.
Provenance: private Ohio collection.
In this modernist painting, Woodruff reinterprets the playful image of a young girl in his abstract idiom of the late 1950s. It is very closely related to the painting entitled Abstract, circa 1960, location unknown, illustrated in Bearden/Henderson p. 213 (incorrectly illustrated on its left side), with the same geometric figures. Woodruff portrayed several versions of a young girl at play in the 1940s and 50s, beginning with The Yellow Bird, circa 1943, at the Clark Atlanta University Galleries and in a later color linoluem cut. The larger and less abstract Girl Skipping Rope from 1959 is in the collection of E.T and Audlyn Higgins Williams, New York. This painting is also closely related to Galaxy from 1959, also at the Clark, sharing the same palette of pinks and blues and the same painterly surface.
